Monthly Archives: September 2012

Stoicism tells us that no happiness can be secure if it’s rooted in changeable, destructible things. Our bank accounts can grow or shrink, our careers can prosper or falter, even our loved ones can be taken from us. There is only one place the world can’t touch: our inner selves, our choice at every moment to be brave, to be reasonable, to be good.

The world might take everything from us; Stoicism tells us that we all have a fortress on the inside. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was born a slave and crippled at a young age, wrote: “Where is the good? In the will…If anyone is unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone.”

Meh. I’ve mentioned before my ambivalence about Stoicism, but Peter Watson tips the scales slightly further toward disapproval for me:

During the first millenium BC, however, attitudes towards animals began to shift. The turning point appears to have come with Aristotle and the Stoics. According to the Stoics, animals are aloga, creatures without reason or belief. The Greeks reanalysed animals’ psychological capacities, Aristotle concluding that tame animals are superior to wild ones. Since animals had no reason, the Stoics concluded that they were made for the use of humans, a view that was taken over by Jews and Christians and finds expression in the bible.

Ah, Conor’s and Freddie’s posts really take me back. These days, I’m more interested in the psychological dimensions of the arguments, especially between people who largely agree on the basic facts of the case yet disagree so violently as to their interpretation.

But it convinced me. After spending nearly two years studying Zen, Taoism and the works of Alan Watts, I think I genuinely achieved a sort of satori — a freedom from the inner weights and contradictions of ordinary life. When a student asked Watts what enlightenment felt like, he said if felt very ordinary — but like walking slightly in the air, an inch above the ground. And that is exactly how I felt — every day.

I don’t know how long the experience lasted. Perhaps as long as a year, perhaps even longer. All that time, Watts and the Zen idea were there in my head, informing my thoughts and actions. The background noise, the static of worry and gabble that informed my old life had disappeared. My head was clear. The philosophy entirely permeated me. My life was truly more joyful than it had ever been. Nothing bothered me. I felt full of energy and optimism.

Same here. Reading Watts didn’t make me feel like I had achieved some sort of esoteric understanding; it was more like realizing how many of the philosophical questions and dilemmas I was preoccupied with were actually incoherent to begin with. It was the “Aha!” moment when your mind latches onto what initially sounds like a vertiginous cacophony and recognizes a familiar melody or rhythm. I used to read about Buddhism and Taoism and wonder what enlightenment was—how would I know it if I found it? How would an enlightened person act in the world? The difference after reading Watts was that I just laughed at the very thought of such questions.

“A man’s religion”—but also a man’s irreligion, James might have said. For the varieties of irreligion reflect the same once-born/twice-born dichotomy as the varieties of religion. The “New Atheists” easily fall into the category of the once-born, being as monolithic in their devotion to science as religious fundamentalists are in their monotheism. “Neo-Atheists,” on the other hand, are aware of the psychological and spiritual deficiencies of atheism and eager to import into secular society some of the enduring “goods” of traditional religions. Thus, they exhibit more of the character of the twice-born. So too, current varieties of will-to-believers are of both types. “New Age” disciples, rejecting traditional religion and aspiring to personal fulfillment and universal harmony, belong to the once-born. “Born-again” Christians, though, are of a mixed variety—twice-born in their acute recognition of sin, which prompts some to return to traditional churches with their rituals and dogmas, while others, like the once-born New-Agers, seek refuge in transitory non-dogmatic, non-ritualistic churches or mega-churches.

She’s repurposing William James’ famous psychological distinction between the once- and twice-born to illuminate the sociopolitical battle between religion and atheism, which is why I’m inclined to quibble with it. I mean, obviously, I would not want fundamentalist Christians crafting policy, but that’s as far as it goes. Beyond the bare minimum effort required to maintain a secular state, social and political proselytizing doesn’t interest me in the slightest. My favorite influences taught me better than that:

The surest way of ruining a youth is to teach him to respect those who think as he does more highly than those who think differently from him.

Ah! How reluctant I am to force my own ideas upon another! How I rejoice in any mood and secret transformation within myself which means that the ideas of another have prevailed over my own!

Even if we were mad enough to consider all our opinions true, we should still not want them alone to exist: I cannot see why it should be desirable that truth alone should rule and be omnipotent; it is enough for me that it should possess great power. But it must be able to struggle and have great opponents, and one must be able to find relief from it from time to time in untruth – otherwise, it will become boring, powerless and tasteless to us, and make us the same.

Whatever kind of bizarre ideal one may follow, one should not demand that it be the ideal, for one therewith takes from it its privileged character. One should have it in order to distinguish oneself, not in order to level oneself.

True believers of all types, regardless of the character of their particular pet cause, would stare in dumbfounded disbelief at someone uttering such notions. Once-born, twice-born, they all derive comfort from bonding with their in-group and seeking to convert or overrun the out-group. I, on the other hand, aim to widen chasms between myself and others as much as possible and create them where they don’t already exist.

I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of ripples on a sheet of river gold…
Better the blue silence and the gray west,
The autumn mist on the river,
And not any hate and not any love,
And not anything at all of the keen and the deep:
Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor,
And the new corn shoveled in bushels
And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows,
Umber lights of the dark,
Umber lanterns of the loam dark.

Here a dog head dreams.
Not any hate, not any love.
Not anything but dreams.
Brother of dusk and umber.

The idea that a neurological explanation could exhaust the meaning of experience was already being mocked as “medical materialism” by the psychologist William James a century ago. And today’s ubiquitous rhetorical confidence about how the brain works papers over a still-enormous scientific uncertainty. Paul Fletcher, professor of health neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, says that he gets “exasperated” by much popular coverage of neuroimaging research, which assumes that “activity in a brain region is the answer to some profound question about psychological processes. This is very hard to justify given how little we currently know about what different regions of the brain actually do.” Too often, he tells me in an email correspondence, a popular writer will “opt for some sort of neuro-flapdoodle in which a highly simplistic and questionable point is accompanied by a suitably grand-sounding neural term and thus acquires a weightiness that it really doesn’t deserve. In my view, this is no different to some mountebank selling quacksalve by talking about the physics of water molecules’ memories, or a beautician talking about action liposomes.”

The human brain, it is said, is the most complex object in the known universe. That a part of it “lights up” on an fMRI scan does not mean the rest is inactive; nor is it obvious what any such lighting-up indicates; nor is it straightforward to infer general lessons about life from experiments conducted under highly artificial conditions.

Heh. I can probably close my eyes, click on any random blogroll link, and find…let’s see…voilà!

For a rationalist, no practice is beyond examination and de­com­position. All are subject to critique. On this view, history, custom, and tradition hold no great weight; the past is mere prologue, not an informative precursor. This is why rationalists assume that they can model and create social arrangements, even whole societies, anew. In the rational vision, the basis of human flourishing is thin, insofar as a few principles serve as the foundations for human happiness. Because of this paucity of principles, the human mind is flexible and powerful enough to comprehend them all and refashion the basic elements so as to optimize them. In other words, a mathematics of politics is feasible.

The empiricist sees things differently. Human affairs are complex, contingent, and difficult to tease apart in their interrelationships. The empiricist is fundamentally an incrementalist, not averse to change on principle but cautious of overturning practices and customs that have served society and individuals in good stead. In many ways the empiricist may seem irrational. The utilitarians of ancient China mocked the Confucians for their devotion to the arts. After all, what use were those in the face of human misery? But today modern anthropologists and psychologists have made functional arguments for the importance of artistic expression in maintaining social cohesion and serving as focal points for collective unity. Music and dance in particular can bring people together. Confucius and his fellow travelers did not defend these practices on scientific grounds; they did not have modern science. Rather, they argued that the old ways were to be revered because they had worked since time immemorial.

This may be unthinking, but social empiricism is unthinking in the same way that natural selection is unthinking. It is an iterative process that sifts optimal solutions by trial and error and maintains previous patches along the way. It is never “perfect,” but it lives to see another day. More prosaically, it manifests in the banal behaviors we take for granted. When we wake up in the morning we brush our teeth, not because we reiterate to ourselves the reason that brushing our teeth is important but because it is part of our routine. This routine is not without ultimate reason, but that rationale has become absorbed into the fabric of communal wisdom, which now maintains it as a matter of habit.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.